How to become a Sport Analyst

What is a Sport Analyst?

A Sport Performance Analyst monitors and records sporting performances for a team/ organisation. Further they liaise with coaches and athletes in training and competitive environments in order to ensure improvements in their performance. This may be done by identifying weaknesses amongst individuals i.e. technically or analysing the overall team tactics.

What skills/experience is required?

Being Calm Under Pressure: You must have an ability to keep your cool when dealing with highly stressful situations.

Team Player: You're able to listen, communicate, and work with a number of different people effectively.

Helpful: You always are looking for new information and methods of helping people to ensure that they are always improving.

Enthusiastic and Knowledgeable: To be a good Sport Analyst you must have expert knowledge on the subject in hand. This might be tactical or technical. You must live, eat and breathe your sport. You should be able to talk at length on your sport and be effective at explaining specific details that nobody else would notice.

Further Skills needed:

-Strong IT Skills

-Good organisational Skills

-Be proactive and focussed

What qualifications are needed?

2:1 degree in Sport and Exercise Science (Desired)

Typical Duties

Filming and Coding sport matches

Providing post-match analysis in the form of video and a statistical reports

Preparing both the coaching team and players for the upcoming games by presenting video and analysis of the opposition

Filming and coding training sessions

Direct involvement in the evaluation of prospective recruitment targets from an analytical perspective

Working in collaboration with other performance staff in centralising all performance data and creating daily reports (such as heart rate & GPS data)

Salary:

Starting Salary, £20,000+

What is the Career Progression?

Sports analysts often progress into elite level sport. Further, some end up going into employment such as Journalism, using the skills that they have learned from sport analysing.

What are the benefits of the job?

You will be working with athletes, often elite athletes which means there is a potential of travelling the country and the world by doing this job.

What are the drawbacks?

The structure of standard work hours is often different to other jobs. You have to work according to the team’s schedule, rather than set times.

More information:

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